She decided to respect them, not because she admired them.
On the contrary, she realized the threat posed by this "embryo" and felt that it was too dangerous to treat the war with the same attitude as in the past.
...If there is a chance, she will definitely suggest to Alvin to drive the mechanical sun over and destroy everything here directly.
Chirp, chirp, quack——
Just as she was thinking, the vehicle suddenly stopped.
The 'big fool' came closer and pointed to a tall building with a spire in the distance. He made a grasping motion with his hands and pretended to blow air into his mouth.
Are we sending her there to eat?
Do you mean take a break?
Hitzfeld readily agreed, and the team quickly pushed through the crowd, following the widest and largest path to the spire.
She began to pay more attention to this unique building.
Obviously, it has religious elements.
There is a cross with a ring on the top of the spire, which is an obvious symbol of masculinity.
In addition, the surface of the building was covered with reliefs. She squinted her eyes and identified them carefully. They were mostly armored warriors holding swords against various demons and monsters... The density of them made people feel uncomfortable.
Except for the load-bearing columns and the roof, the entire outer perimeter of the spire was almost completely carved. This unique style clearly did not belong to Sarah, but reminded Hitzfeld of those cursed pottery jars.
Walking in, she saw a line of characters carved above the main entrance.
She knew the characters, for they were ancient Sarai, and she said them silently in her mind:
[Dirty eyes cannot blind the heart.]
【The sun's rays will shine upon us here forever. 】
【Maintain our last purity. 】
Chapter 67: Library
What's the meaning……?
Even as he entered the building, Hitzfeld was still thinking about those three lines of characters.
It sounds like some kind of prayer, and also a bit like a last will.
She remembered that before she set out, she encountered Year Ring in the corridor of the dream world and learned part of the truth about the doomsday from Year Ring.
Maybe she couldn't tell the truth... She didn't know why the gray fog came, and she didn't know what was hidden behind the gray fog. Those were just some of her own experiences.
According to the tree rings, it was the end of the Thran Dynasty. Because the human world was caught off guard by the invasion of the gray fog, it suffered heavy losses in the erosion of evil spirits. Many cities turned into dead areas, and even if there were still living people, they were all madmen and fools.
This is not an exaggeration. After all, it was the beginning of the disaster. There was no Mechanical Yang Slate and no Mechanical Yang Cult. People could only rely on the most primitive methods to fight against the evil spirits. The only method that was suitable for most people was not to sleep.
Nightmares can inspire fear in people's hearts, and monsters can grow from them. In order to prevent themselves from going crazy in their sleep, people will definitely control themselves and try to sleep as little as possible.
But not everyone can suffer from insomnia like Hitzfeld. For ordinary people, they will start to feel tired if they don't sleep for one day. If this number is extended to two or three days, not to mention being alert, their consciousness will fall into chaos.
That is actually the most dangerous state.
Tired and exhausted. The body's functions could not get a rest, and the fear of nightmares in the heart was pulled to the highest level. The mental consciousness gradually became between half asleep and half awake - even if this state was not contaminated and eaten by the evil spirits in the gray fog, it was not far from a madman.
The annual rings did describe relevant examples, such as some people having hallucinations due to extreme fatigue, and after killing the monsters they imagined, they discovered that they were their relatives, thus falling into even more intense madness and completely throwing themselves into the embrace of the gray fog.
This ancient city, Soth Fortress...could it have also suffered a devastating disaster because of this?
Hitzfeld began to construct a possibility: she imagined turning the time of the ancient city back to around 1800 and witnessing with her own eyes the gray fog filling the entire city.
Evil spirits began to appear, nightmares began to eat people, the soldiers guarding the fortress suffered heavy casualties in the battle with the monsters, and the people in the civilian area were either forced to take up arms or place all their hopes on faith.
Faith... But the tree rings also said that only those who believe in the Sun Goddess and those without faith can survive the initial catastrophe.
So could it be that the people who believed in other gods turned into monsters and began to attack the entire fortress from the inside, and this spire building was a church of the sun goddess at that time?
Those densely packed reliefs are neither Sara style nor Seran style, but rather very similar to the Latadia style seen before... Perhaps it persisted for a long time in this civil strife, and these reliefs are some kind of record... or proof of the process of persistence.
But they had no supplies and no reinforcements, and evil disasters were breaking out all over the country at the time, so no one was available to rescue them, and so they ultimately failed to hold on.
From this perspective, perhaps those characters are the last words...
Because she was deprived of the right to speak, Hitzfeld's thoughts worked faster than usual. In such a short journey, she had already thought of a lot of random things. It was only after the "big fool" reminded her that she woke up.
So these fools transformed the church of the Sun Goddess, the most sacred place in the eyes of all believers, into a hotel...
Looking at the long tables in the hall and the strange waiters who were walking around serving food, Hitzfeld once again felt a deep sense of powerlessness and disharmony.
But she gradually got used to it and didn't intend to argue about it. She sat down obediently under the guidance of these people.
Lunch was sumptuous.
The creepers don't only eat raw food as the legend says, they can make fire. The most basic inference is that animals that have tasted cooked food will basically love it.
Roasted spider legs, roasted spider sacs, roasted lizard tails, and even larger roasted whole lambs.
As Hitzfeld ate, she analyzed the types of food and was surprised to find that there was a kind of coarse grain in the dish, which tasted a bit like that original green wheat.
This shows that the creepers may have mastered "planting", and the emergence of "planting" technology is tantamount to a major leap forward for primitive civilization!
This is a very simple truth... because only by mastering planting and primitive civilization... can those tribes gradually transform from gathering civilization and hunting civilization to advanced civilization.
The development of civilization cannot be achieved by simply piling up time; it also requires some luck and some coincidences.
That luck might be discovering that planting can bring more food.
Gathering and hunting alone are not enough to stably obtain sufficient food, and they also waste a lot of time. Throughout history, there have been many powerful primitive civilizations that relied mainly on hunting, but they either quickly became extinct or survived with difficulty, becoming backward natives in the eyes of modern people.
The civilization that learned to grow crops took another path. They gradually transformed and evolved into an agricultural civilization and began to have more stable residences and outputs. Only on this basis could they further develop subsequent cultures.
Hitzfeld was very worried during the meal. She was not only worried about the emperor worms, but also worried that the creepers were developing at an alarming speed and that a plains parish might not be able to stop them.
For a long time, Sara's military system had not encountered an opponent of the same level. They mostly fought against some fierce places and had hardly started a large-scale war.
In this situation, what if... She meant what if...
What if tens of thousands of creepers suddenly rushed out from the red soil plains, and they could command worm swarms ten or a hundred times their own number...Does Sarah really have a chance of winning?
I'm afraid that even if we move the mechanical sun out and leave it there to burn, it won't burn out in a while.
After lunch, all the crawlers could see that Hitzfeld's spirits were low.
They were a little confused, and after trying various ways to cheer her up without success, the big, stupid knight came up to her and gestured to take her to a place.
Hitzfeld didn't care. She had never been to any place here anyway, so she followed.
The place where the big guy took her was behind the church.
After opening a huge stone door and seeing the scene inside, Hitzfeld was stunned.
This is... the library?
There were so many bookcases, many of which had collapsed and decayed. Countless books were piled up in a mess on the ground, each covered with dust.
As I stepped through the stone gate, I heard a crisp sound under my feet.
Looking down, I found it was a skull.
No one knew how long it had been lying there. Its bones had long since shrunk and become brittle, and her foot crushed its skull.
Grinning, she then discovered it wasn't the only one.
There are many skeletons in the library, some wearing tattered robes, and some covered in rusty armor.
Armor on the outside, cloth robe on the inside.
She estimated that this was the last place the church survivors retreated to.
They were chased and killed by the enemy here, and their bodies were buried with the books.
Chapter 68 Language Analysis
Time seemed to have lost its meaning in the darkness. When Hitzfeld remembered to record the time, she was already on her way to the prison with a large iron-covered book in her arms.
Standing at the gate were two creeper guards nearly two meters tall. When she approached, they lowered their spears and pointed them at her, and only relaxed when they saw her clothes and hair color clearly.
This is another interesting discovery that Hitzfeld made: just as she had little ability to distinguish different creepers by their appearance, these guys also rely on the characteristics of clothing to identify humans.
The guard opened the iron gate for her. She bent down and walked straight to the end. On her left was the room where Xia was imprisoned.
When he saw the situation inside clearly, Hitzfeld couldn't help rubbing his eyes through the fence.
As she expected, Xia Yibing was locked in a small room, her weapons were taken away, and even her pocket watch was gone. She could only lie in bed bored and wait for her to come back.
But the reality was that Xia Yibing was squatting on the ground with her back to the door, engraving something, and at the door - where the slight firelight could reach was already densely engraved with words.
"Xia?" She couldn't help but call out.
"Aisun?" Xia Yibing turned around and smiled when she saw her. "Come in! You will never guess what I found."
She tilted her head to look at the guard traveling with her, and indeed, he was covering his ears, as if all that was produced when they were communicating was noise.
Let it open the door, Hitzfeld stepped in, and stood at the door to look at the small words engraved on it.
They were basically all Sara language, mixed with some meaningless simulated syllables. After reading for a while, Hitzfeld was sure that Xia Yibing was already working on deciphering the language used by the Creepers.
"How did you do it?" She opened her mouth and looked at the woman with a hint of disbelief.
There are not many things that can shock her. She thought that giving Xia Yibing three days was already too much, but she didn't expect that in less than a day, she had made research progress without any external help.
"Come over here, a little to the right." Xia Yibing stood up and pulled her. "I started writing from here. It will be easier to explain to you if you start from here."
Hitzfeld didn't resist, she was also curious about how she did it.
"After you left, I thought that since we had so little time, we should not waste it, so I went to talk to the guard outside... ahem! We had a 'friendly' exchange."
The corner of the girl's mouth twitched. She probably understood why those guards showed such extremely hateful and disgusting looks when they approached the cell.
The language of the crawlers is very unpleasant to humans. If their hissing sound were a little louder, it would be like sliding fingernails on a blackboard in the ears. Just listening to the sound is torture.
Conversely, they heard human voices in the same way, so Xia Yibing's so-called communication was definitely a nightmare for the guards. If they didn't insist on coming here, they would never want to get close to here again.
"I analyzed some of their syllables, and at least I understood the usage of pronouns like 'you', 'I', etc." Xia Yibing pointed at the Sara language on the ground and kept talking. "Because of the language barrier, I couldn't ask them to send me notebooks and pens. Fortunately, the shells of those lobster legs are hard enough, so I can use them to carve words."
"You thought those were lobster legs?"
"Isn't it?"
"...You continue."
Hitzfeld's lips curled up slightly. She discovered that Xia Yibing's IQ was unique. When her brain was fully focused on one thing, her ability to understand other things - even if it was common sense - would drop sharply.
This is the underground world, not the beach, and she didn't even think about where to find lobsters.
"Look at the grammar I listed first." The woman patted her to bring her back to her senses. "It's the position of these words in a sentence. I replaced the ones I didn't recognize with random symbols, but the position is correct. Look at this first... Don't you think it looks familiar?"
"This is..." Hitzfeld didn't quite understand it at first, but after she reminded him, he immediately realized, "Ancient Sara language!?"
"Yes." Xia Yibing nodded. "Whether in long or short sentences, the position of personal pronouns is basically the same as in ancient Sarai."
"Coincidence?"
"I don't think it's a coincidence." Xia Yibing clapped her hands, "But I know too little about it at the moment... If you could help me accumulate more vocabulary..."
"Bang!" Hitzfeld stuffed the big iron-covered book into her hand and sat down on the bed next to her.
"What is this?" Xia Yibing weighed the thing in her hand.
It's so heavy.
Is it a book that weighs at least eight or nine kilograms and is made entirely of metal?
Will there be details on the creeper language in here?
"Not really... what you want is here." Hitzfeld took out a small notebook, turned to the last page and handed it to her. "Guessing some short sentences and the order of syllable markings. This should be in the field of grammar... Everything I can collect is here."
This is not a simple task.
To record a completely unfamiliar language in this way, all Hitzfeld had to do was memorize every syllable spoken by the other person during their daily interactions.
For example, when she sees something and the other person reads out its name, she has to write down the syllable of the name first. In this way, when the other person uses the syllable to describe the thing next time, she can be basically sure that the syllable she remembers is its pronunciation.
Without outstanding talent and memory, even this kind of record-keeping work cannot be done, so Hitzfeld sincerely sighed at how terrifying Xia Yibing's language talent was, which was stronger than his own.
"Then the book you gave me..."
"Oh, that's my discovery... You read the book first, we'll talk about that later."
